JFK assassination reshaped politics of the right

Lawrence Rosenthal

November 21, 2013Updated: November 23, 2013 2:27pm

Photo: Associated Press

FILE - In this Monday, Nov. 25, 1963 file photo, 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. salutes his father's casket in Washington, three days after the president was assassinated in Dallas. Widow Jacqueline Kennedy, center, and daughter Caroline Kennedy are accompanied by the late president's brothers Sen. Edward Kennedy, left, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. (AP Photo/File)

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the crack in America's postwar arc. It was the moment that let Middle America know all was not as comfy as it seemed. Chaotic forces lay beneath the smiling optimism of postwar life.

Something called "the '60s" was around the corner. Mostly this conjures up images of the counterculture, as though Beaver Cleaver the child crawled through that crack and emerged as Abbie Hoffman the young man. A year after the assassination came the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Five years later came the riots at the Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago.

But a year after the assassination, Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee for president. Three years later, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. The counterculture might have sucked up all the media oxygen of that thing called the '60s, but it was the parallel developments on the right that would come to dominate American politics long after the counterculture flamed out.

Texas in 1963 was edgy, with right-wingers who despised Kennedy. Then, their leading issue was the Cold War. At a 1961 White House reception for Texas newspaper publishers, Ted Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, openly dressed down the president. "We need a man on horseback to lead this nation," Dealey rose from among his colleagues to say. "And many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline's tricycle."

Kennedy's fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba confirmed the kind of thinking that had blossomed a decade earlier under Joe McCarthy: that the Democratic Party was a den of traitors.

Texas today seethes with vitriol aimed at President Obama. The state's governor has talked of secession. The Tea Party Nation routinely refers on its blog to the Democrats as the Party of Treason.

The foreign policy McCarthyism that met JFK in 1963 has morphed into a domestic-issues McCarthyism today.

The assassination heralded not only an impending left counterculture but also a national coming of age of a political right whose most virulent feelings have often been subsumed under the smiling faces of a Ronald Reagan or a George W. Bush.

Lawrence Rosenthal is the executive director of the UC Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.